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Bills are Not a Changelog—Why You Can’t Turn Legislation into Laws

There is a common belief that since laws are the result of legislation, then surely one can automatically assemble an amended version of the code based on the bills that have passed the legislature. This is both a really cool idea and wrong.

Your standard narrative of how a bill becomes law doesn’t really cover what it purports to cover. Usually what’s really being explained is how a bill passes, but not how it becomes law. There’s a whole process between the passage of a bill and the encoding of that bill in a state’s codified laws.

Legislatures pass hundreds or thousands of bills every year, some of which are budgetary, some of which are to define their own rules, some of which pertain to state administration, and some of which are resolutions. The remainder are patches to be applied to law, either proposing a new section or amending an existing one (by either adding or removing material). These patches look familiar to anybody who has seen a prettied-up diff, and it’s wholly logical to figure that amending the state’s laws should simply mean collecting all of the bills that pass and applying those patches to the laws.

The trouble is that these patches are not always the last word on the changes that are going to be made to existing law.

The Commission may correct unmistakable printer’s errors, misspellings and other unmistakable errors in the statutes as incorporated into the Code of Virginia, and may make consequential changes in the titles of officers and agencies, and other purely consequential changes made necessary by the use in the statutes of titles, terminology and references, or other language no longer appropriate.

The Commission may renumber, rename, and rearrange any Code of Virginia titles, chapters, articles, and sections in the statutes adopted, and make corresponding changes in lists of chapter, article, and section headings, catchlines, and tables, when, in the judgment of the Commission, it is necessary because of any disturbance or interruption of orderly or consecutive arrangement.

The Commission may correct unmistakable errors in cross-references to Code of Virginia sections and may change cross-references to Code of Virginia sections which have become outdated or incorrect due to subsequent amendment to, revision, or repeal of the sections to which reference is made.

The Commission may omit from the statutes incorporated into the Code of Virginia provisions which, in the judgment of the Commission, are inappropriate in a code, such as emergency clauses, clauses providing for specific nonrecurring appropriations and general repealing clauses.

(TL;DR: The Code Commission can make a lot of changes during that in-between period when a bill has passed, but it’s not quite yet a law.)

It is not unusual for the legislature to amend a bill at the very last minute, without proper review. From the marked-up format of a bill (words crossed out, others inserted) what can emerge is grammatically incorrect or even contains logical errors. It’s surely a judgment call whether such problems can be fixed by the Virginia Code Commission or whether it will require the General Assembly to fix them, which may well require a delay of nearly a year.

Here, for instance, is a selection of the 35 changes made to the Code of Virginia by Code Commission staff since the 2011 edition was published:

Second sentence, after “responsibility to” add “(i) establish an address confidentiality program in accordance with § 2.2-515.2, (ii)” and change “programs and shall report” to read “programs, and (iii) report”

10/25/2011

2.2-2338

In first paragraph, (i) change “13 voting members” to “12 voting members”; (ii) insert “and” after “Commerce and Trade,”; and (iii) delete “and the Assistant to the Governor for Commonwealth Preparedness”

8/5/2011

2.2-2699.5

Subsection B, replace “Assistant to the Governor for Commonwealth Preparedness” with “Secretary of Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security”

8/5/2011

2.2-4509

Change “AA by Moody’s” to “Aa by Moody’s”

10/25/2011

6.2-314

End of catchline, change “institution” to “institutions”

10/25/2011

6.2-412

End of catchline, change “improvement” to “improvements”

10/25/2011

In Virginia—as in other states, although I don’t know how many—an attempt to use legislation as a changelog for the state code would yield results that would be very convincing-looking, but that would deviate substantially from the official code. Bills must frequently pass through a human filter before they become laws. That’s not something that you can simulate with a Ruby gem or a PEAR package. Some things just require some thought, in ways that can’t yet be automated.

6 thoughts on “Bills are Not a Changelog—Why You Can’t Turn Legislation into Laws”

I understand the “tweaking” that happens but it appears that the tweaking cannot violate the original fidelity of the intended legislation so what else would be different?

Your explanation of the process is fascinating…. and illuminating.

But what you’re not saying is that legislation somehow goes through this process grinder and ends up with unintended effects – or the vast majority of the legislation does intend generate code that works the way the legislation intended.

Although I imagine that it would, I cannot say so definitively, because I have not attempted to piece together updates to the code from legislation.

But what you’re not saying is that legislation somehow goes through this process grinder and ends up with unintended effects – or the vast majority of the legislation does intend generate code that works the way the legislation intended.

I’m not quite following, Larry, but I’ll give it a shot. :) The vast majority of legislation appears to accomplish just what it sets out to accomplish—that is, I believe that the resulting law is modified precisely as specified in the bill. But some legislation does emerge from the legislature with errors, and those errors that are caught by the Code Commission must be either corrected by them, or left to stand if the errors are severe, with the legislature fixing their mistake in the following year’s session.

This problem surely affects only a small percentage of all legislation, but if it routinely affects anymore more than a minute quantity of bills (as it does), then that is sufficient to make it impossible to apply legislation as a patch and believe that the resulting text is as accurate as the text produced by the Code Commission and Lexis Nexis.

Luckily, that’s the Virginia Code Commission’s problem! In theory, their changes should be incorporated into the following year’s text, so there should be no need to deal with changes greater than a year old.

so then you have to essentially go through the whole process again for the new stuff, right?

That was what I was planning on doing, but I realized partway through that there’s an easier way. While there’s a big import process every year for the new code, I’m working on a little patch system that will take the Code Commission’s occasional updates and apply them to Virginia Decoded throughout the year, making the same amendments to my copy of the code that the Code Commission has made to the official copy of the code. Exactly how that will work, though, I haven’t yet figured out. :)